In his book, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, Kevin Roberts, CEO of the global advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, explains that fads attract, but without love, it’s a passing infatuation. He shows that the most successful organizations create fanatical loyalty that goes way beyond reason to highly charged emotional connections. Chapter titles include “All You Need is Love,” […]
Read post »Southwest Airlines has not only been the most financially successful airline in history it has also produced the #1 return to investors of all S&P 500 publicly traded companies for a 30 year period. Herb Kelleher, co-founder, Chairman Emeritus, and former CEO declares, “it’s the intangibles that are the hardest things for competitors to imitate. […]
Read post »Looking beyond the commercialization of Valentine’s Day, it’s a great time to nurture our inner romantic and express gratitude for our loved ones. As I write I am listening to a randomized Beatles playlist. Of the nearly 200 songs on the list, “The Word” started playing as I began this blog post. Its opening lines […]
Read post »John Kotter and James Heskett’s classic book, Corporate Culture and Performance, is an organization development classic. The book provided solid evidence of the payoffs that come from adaptive cultures and the negative power of unadaptive cultures. Adaptability is absolutely critical today. As change tsunamis relentlessly sweep the globe, adaptive organizations are getting stronger and unadaptive […]
Read post »The company is at a critical leadership crossroad. As with many fast growing startups, their pioneering product development and marketing power made them a major international success. Now Lazaridis and Ballsillie face the critical entrepreneurial growth test: can they shift from building the business to building an executive team that builds the business?
Read post »The New York Times recently published an in-depth look at the zany – and wildly successful – culture that propelled Southwest Airlines to become the largest U.S. domestic carrier over the past 40 years. Entitled “Pushing 40, Southwest is Still Playing the Rebel,” this entertaining and educational article explains how the company’s very powerful culture […]
Read post »My last post looked at a common cause of poor internal or external customer service rooted in not seeing – or hearing – customers in 3D. A major contributor to this problem, and the resulting “functional chimneys,” is management’s failure to listen to the needs of service teams and their individual contributors. “If you don’t […]
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